The idea of a trout

February 23, 2012

Creel by Michael Coffey

The worms were there at the corner of my grandfather’s garden, near the burn barrel, wanting me to dig them, bring them to some other wilder reality, in this case a cold April morning in the Adirondacks. I’d fetch the round-point shovel out of the garage and bring the green bait can, if I could find it, or use one of the slender Prince Albert tobacco cans my grandfather had discarded, a small red tin flask with a snap-top. I’d turn over a half-dozen shovelfuls of rich dirt like fudge and wait to see the purplish worms slowly squirming, sometimes only their tips visible, nosing around blindly in the fresh cut of air. One after another I’d pry them out with my fingers and into the can they would go, with a little tuft of grass and the black dirt to keep them alive.

I’d walk up the abandoned broken-up pavement that ran along the brook. In the trees it was dark and the only sound was the rushing of the brook, high with snowmelt off the mountain. I’d look for those pools Dad told me held the promise of trout, as if they were lingering there, holding themselves steady and unseen beneath the surface, waiting for feed to wash through. Kneeling on the bank, I’d bait the hook, a process that began first with trying to extract a worm from the can—they all seemed to know how to burrow in and disappear. But one would soon be captured, and though it writhed in my hand, the barb sounded it into surrender, as his body against its will became the meat sleeve of the metal shaft, Eagle No. 9.

The idea of a trout is pure muscle, muscle twitch defined against the press of the water, redefined at the end of the pole in my hand when it flips into the free, wary air, snapping back and forth. When it came, it was like some stranger suddenly touching me intimately or somewhere where I did not control the reflex—a swab stick on my tonsil, the hammer tap below my patella from Dr. Ganong. I’d start marching in a controlled panic, my sneakers splashing to land the catch in the brush. I didn’t care if the reel got wet or if the line got tangled as long as I got that trout, its green silvery red-speckled body in furious spasm, hung up there on a branch.

I’d learned to palm the sticky cold fuselage in one hand and with the other remove the hook as humanely as I could. The blood was thin, a smear of it. It smelled fishy; the worm was there, limp as a soaked shoelace slinking out of a gill. With a slight crunch the hook was extracted and the trout, its eye dull and disbelieving, dropped into my creel, the top shut fast. It whopped around in there for a good half hour while I recomposed myself, untangling my line, and fantasizing how many more I might get, until I didn’t hear the trout moving anymore in the creel, only the roar of brook and some stones tumbling.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Michael Coffey’s story, “I Thought You Were Dale,” appeared in NER 32.3. He is the author of three book of poetry and is is co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly.

Black market delicacies

February 16, 2012

The Leningrad Dress | Nonfiction by Anne Raeff

In the summer of 1973 we visited my father’s relatives in the Soviet Union. For the trip, my parents bought six oversized suitcases and stuffed them with clothing, toys and Timex watches. We presented these gifts to our relatives, the ones who were not afraid to have contact with foreigners, at my great aunt Vera’s gloomy communal apartment, where we were served black market delicacies—caviar, herring, chocolate, oranges—and plenty of vodka. Even we children got a taste.

One particularly hot afternoon after another lunch filled with elaborate toasts that I didn’t understand, my parents allowed me to take my sister to the park for an ice cream. My father wrote down what I should say to the ice cream vendor in Romanized Russian, and made me practice it until I had it right. After successfully procuring two double-scoop cones, we were sitting on a bench enjoying our treat when a group of Japanese tourists surrounded us.

“Photo, photo,” they said.

“We’re American,” we said, pointing to our shoes and jeans, “American,” but they were already snapping away happily.

Among the relatives I met the summer of 1973 was Natasha, who, with my father’s sponsorship, immigrated here in 1980 with her daughter Katya and her parents. Today Natasha lives with her American husband Joe, an avid fan of conservative talk radio, in a four-bedroom/three-and-a-half bathroom house in a suburban development of Baltimore.

I visited them recently, and Katya and her husband came for dinner. Natasha prepared a full Russian meal, including a great variety of zakuski—herring, cabbage, beet and mushroom salad—served with potatoes and Russian black bread. Of course we drank vodka and raised our glasses in long, sentimental toasts to family members who were no longer with us, including my father, and, at Natasha’s insistence, to the United States and freedom.

After dinner, while Joe watched Fox news, which I was able to tune out by concentrating on the photos and drinking more vodka, we looked at Natasha’s photo albums.

“I remember that dress,” I said, pointing to a picture of Katya posing in front of The Hermitage. She was wearing my dress, one of many hand-me-downs that we had included in the suitcases of gifts we brought to the Soviet Union in 1973. I had been happy to pass it off: “I hated it. It made me look pregnant, the way it flared out above the waist. Whenever I wore it, the boys asked me how many months along I was and whether I was hoping for a boy or a girl. I cried every time my mother laid it out.”

“I would have worn that dress every day if my mother had let me,” Katya said. “No one in all of Leningrad had a dress like that.”

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Anne Raeff’s short stories “The Buchovskys on Their Own” and “Keeping an Eye on Jakobson” appeared in previous issues of NER. She is the author of the novel Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia.

How to Live

February 9, 2012

Fiction by Christine Sneed

Michele’s daughter returned home in June, just after the solstice, from a year spent studying classical music in Madrid. Along with her guitar, she brought back a suitcase filled with dirty clothes, some of the shirts missing buttons, the jeans all with frayed cuffs. She also brought back a child five months from being born. Lindsay, Michele’s daughter, was twenty-three and unhappy in a way that made her wonder if unhappiness were her vocation, the way other people took up cooking or politics. The baby’s father was not someone she wanted to marry, though he had not asked her to marry him. He was a year younger than she was, had other girlfriends and smoked too much and spoke little English, though he did speak French and Italian along with his native Spanish. He was certain that he had a remarkable future ahead of him and children were not a part of it, at least not for a long time, something that Lindsay told her mother, who rolled her eyes and thought of her husband, Lindsay’s father, who had died ten years earlier and left her with debts she paid by selling their house with its rose trellises and vegetable garden and weeping willow. Lindsay’s father had invested the money he had inherited at twenty-seven from his parents in his friends’ businesses. He had been generous and foolish and infuriating, and Michele had adored him, even after she realized, a few years into their marriage, that she would be better off without him. Her daughter, however, did not adore her baby’s father. Her daughter had returned from Spain no longer a romantic, which bothered Michele more than the pregnancy.

“You don’t have to keep it,” she told Lindsay. “You could give it up for adoption. That’s probably the best thing to do.”

“I might,” was all Lindsay would say. “I don’t know yet.”

Other women her age had children all the time. If she had it, the baby would be given a name and learn to walk and eat solid food and sometimes he would cry in the middle of the night and Lindsay would not know how to console him. He would grow up and meet someone who became important to him very quickly and he would believe his life had changed and that everything would be different from that point on. She could see this was how many people lived: as if everything were already decided and they needed only to wait until they were delivered into the arms of the person who would love them to the exclusion of everyone else. This was, after all, what the songs she liked most were about, the movies and poems and novels, even the comic books. You lived as if someone could hardly wait to meet you. Possibly, this was the only way to live.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Christine Sneed has published four stories in NER, one of which was selected for Best American Short Stories 2008. Her collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was published in November 2010 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

From negative ∞ to 0

February 2, 2012

The Annotated Mix-Tape #20:
“Blue Monday” by New Order
(b/w “The Beach,” 12” single, Factory Records, 1983)

By Joshua Harmon

Ben and I were high school scientists. Though, like many kids our age, we pursued old rail lines into tunnels, snapped photos inside abandoned state hospitals, and picnicked at midnight in a field glowing with the local airport’s landing-strip lights, we also stole a centrifuge from our school chemistry lab so we could “separate drinks.” (Ben’s mom later sold it at a yard sale.) We picked random names we found interesting from our city’s phonebook and mailed those people copies of our ’zine, Sketch Fifty-Three. (No one replied.) Ben endeavored to perfect the “cookie loaf,” collecting, in a plastic bag in his fridge, a year’s worth of leftover crumbs from every cookie he ate. When the bag was full, he mixed its contents with some cream cheese, spread it in a pan, and baked it. (Thin, hard, dense.) I sought to condition my body to require less sleep—an obvious waste. I stayed up weeknights until about one o’clock, then set my alarm for 5:24 am exactly, at which point I’d rise, turn on the shower, and pass out on the bathmat for several more minutes before crawling under the water. (“So spiritual,” a friend’s mom remarked when I once explained this process.) Because of my increasingly low enthusiasm for school and my increasing sleep deficit, as well as my almost-physical craving for music, I roused myself each day by blaring my stereo before I left the house at quarter past seven to walk the silent mile to school.

One morning, I chose New Order’s “Blue Monday” to test the power handling of my cheap-but-big Yamaha speakers. The volume control on the amplifier I used then did not go to ten but instead measured decibels from negative ∞ to 0, a scale I admired for its objective precision even if I didn’t fully understand it. (My father had moved out months earlier, and we were all recalibrating our understandings.) That opening drum machine beat, already jackhammer-like, pounded through the house: my mother, still in bed trying to rally herself for her own day’s efforts, howled “not yet!”

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Joshua Harmon’s The Annotated Mix-Tape is a work-in-progress; other selections may be read online at Open Letters Monthly and Coldfront, and have been published or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Believer, and The Cincinnati Review. His most recent book is Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize. His essay “Speculative Markets and the 7-inch Single” appeared in NER 32.3.

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